The invention refers to apparatus for the production of velour needlefelt webs of material through processing, i.e. needle punching a fiber fleece with felting needles for the purpose of bonding said fleece and subsequently needle punching the pre-bonded fiber fleece using fork needles forming pile loops.
It is already known to produce velour needlefelt webs using needling techniques. Up to now it was done by building up or cutting a lengthwise orientated fiber fleece web delivered from a carding machine, in a zig-zag manner using a cross layer to form a multi voluminous, transverse-orientated fiber fleece which is then subjected to further processing. The mentioned type of production of the fleece to be further processed causes an irregular build-up of the fleece, in particular an undesired increase in the thickness of the fleece in the edge region.
It is furthermore a disadvantage that when needling such a fleece, the thickness of the edge is further increased through the shrivelling of the material web, and this makes it necessary to cut the web causing a considerable amount of waste. The further processing of such a fleece is carried out in that said fiber fleece is needled for the purpose of bonding and subsequently the pile is formed using fork needles which push the pile loops out of the already relatively evenly bonded fiber fleece.
This mode of operation has several significant disadvantages, those concerning production as well as those regarding the quality of the end product.
As the fibers forming the pile loops have to be pushed out of the fiber fleece which has necessarily been bonded in its entire thickness, and as this fiber fleece has already undergone considerable compression, quite a considerable amount of work has to be performed in order to form the pile. This necessitates a high driving power of the machine as well as an extremely rigid machine design which is able to absorb the strong forces. As the end product is mainly for use as floor covering, the web must have a certain minimum width. The machine frame design must correspond to this width, so an enormous construction expense is inevitable with the common web widths, due to the required rigidity of the machine parts involved.
It is also a disadvantage that the machine output is limited as a result of heating-up of the tools and machine parts occurring due to the high rubbing effect during the needling of the fiber web, especially during the pile formation, said heating often having detrimental effects on the fiber material as well as on the machine itself.
Finally, regarding the end product, it is disadvantageous that according to the already known method only 25-30% of the fiber material can be pushed out of the pre-bonded fiber fleece to form the pile, and this results in a very poorly formed fabric due to too low a pile density, and this enables only a very limited use.
A machine or unit for producing such velour needlefelt webs consists of the carding unit, the transverse or cross layer, a preneedling machine and a main needling machine, a velour needling machine and the necessary devices for the subsequent treatment of the mechanically processed web. This list clearly shows the hitherto considerable expenditure of apparatus, wherein it must be considered that the individual machines or devices must be of a width corresponding to that of the material web.